Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast

For the last 4 years, FDSA has been working to provide high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports online, using only the most current and progressive training methods.
And now we’re bringing that same focus to you in a new way. Each episode of the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast will feature an interview with a leading name in the competitive dog sports training world, talking in depth about issues that often get overlooked by traditional training methods. We'll release a new episode every Friday, so stay tuned--and happy training!

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Julie Symons is owner and head dog trainer at Savvy Dog Sports and she joined to break down what it's like to compete in a nose work trial, plus we talk introducing handler scent to your nose work dog.

Next Episode:

To be released 7/06/2018, featuring Donna Hill, talking about owner-handler trained service dogs and what it takes to get a fantastic recall.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau:This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we have Julie Symons, owner and head dog trainer at Savvy Dog Sports, to talk about scentwork.

Welcome back to the podcast Julie!

Julie Symons:Hi Melissa. It’s great to be here again.

Melissa Breau:I’m excited to chat. Just to refresh everyone’s memories, can you share a little bit about who you are and the dogs that you share your life with?

Julie Symons:I’ve been training since the early to mid-1990s. Started out, I think, obedience, like most people probably did, and then agility came on the scene, and then I got my first purebred dog. What I was really drawn to from the very beginning was the versatile sports that I got into with my dog and how much I enjoyed the cross-training. I’ve stayed with the Belgian breed so far and really enjoyed that journey, and starting to look at some other breeds as well. I also incorporated my Savvy Dog Sports training, I have my own training center now, and I just very recently, haven’t really gone public with it, gave my notice at my corporate day job that I’ve been at for 30 years, and my last day is July 6, so that’s pretty exciting for me. A lot of change going on.

Melissa Breau:That’s awesome. Congrats. That’s so exciting.

Julie Symons:My two dogs that I have, Savvy, who I can’t believe is 10-and-a-half. She’s done everything I wanted her to do. She is a breed champion, she has her MACH 2, she has her TDX, she has her UD, and she has her Elite 1 nosework trial. Right there it shows my love of versatility, and how well dogs enjoy and that we can train across different sports. Obviously all this occurred over her lifespan up to now. I didn’t do it all in one year, obviously. But we’re focusing on nosework now and enjoying trialing her at the Elite level, and just want to see how far I can go with that before she’s just not able to trial.

And then I have my baby dog, who’s not really a baby anymore, Drac, who’s a Belgian Malinois. I got him because I thought having two different genders would work out better in the household, and it really does. They get along great. He’s 2-and-a-half, and he’s out of most of his hormonal peak. He was a late bloomer, I think, and I think with boy dogs they mature a little slower. I’m really, really seeing the days of adolescence in our past, and really see the potential in how I can get a little bit more … not that I wasn’t serious, but more serious and formal with his training coming up, so I’m really excited about that. We trialed in nosework and confirmation so far with him.

Melissa Breau:Awesome, and that’s reassuring to hear, considering I have a year-and-change puppy, a boy, still definitely maturing.

Julie Symons:I wrote a blog about that, I believe, and I saw somebody recently asking and I haven’t had time to reply, but I am experiencing the first time for myself having an intact male. The last year I’ve been busy with other stuff, I’m still training him, but I didn’t put any pressure on him or myself, and he’s really come along. For example, in agility classes I couldn’t get his nose off the ground. Now he stays in the whole class without sniffing the ground. It just was waiting that out and working with him, letting him acclimate, and not putting the pressure on either one of us.

Melissa Breau:So, I wanted to talk about trialing in nosework. I know you have this webinar coming up on achieving nosework trial day success, so I was hoping you might start us out by walking us through what a nosework trial looks like. I know it’s super-different than some of the other sports that are out there. What that looks like, how it works, and when everything goes well.

Julie Symons:Absolutely. One thing that’s interesting about it, at least in the Nosework Association, which is the main venue that most of us got involved with, is you get maybe 30 to 40 dogs, total, at a trial, and you are staying in your parking lot with the dogs inside because they usually are in locations where it’s not like a training building and you can’t crate anywhere else. So you have to get used to working out of the car, and your dog does have to get used to hanging out in the car all day long. You have to deal with, handle the different temperatures and weather concerns you may have, and when you get there, especially with the Nosework Association, they don’t want a lot of dogs hanging out and wandering around because, as many people know who do nosework, a lot of it is geared toward supportive reactive dogs.

In the AKC venue it’s just like a regular AKC trial, but most people are still very courteous of that. A little bit different situation in their locations, but for the most part you’re at a school or maybe a Boys Club of America or something that you’re just going to be waiting outside with your dog.

They have a running order, and there’s a briefing, so you meet with maybe the host, the judges, and they talk about some of the logistics and the situations of how the day is going to run. They tell you if there are back-to-back searches, are you going to run and then go back to your car, and then they take you on a walkthrough. So you go on a walkthrough — most trials you get a walkthrough, some of them you don’t, depending on the level — you get a look at your search areas, and then you come back and ask questions about the areas, if you have them. And then the judge or the certifying official, depending on what venue, will go over how many hides you have, if it’s a level of known hides, and your time limit that you have to search.

Except for AKC, where they do a lot of spectators if there’s room, you are generally in there searching, nobody else can watch. There’s a few people in the room that are timing and judging and videoing and things like that. It can be a very low-key situation. For some dogs it can be a little worrisome, when you go into this empty room with one or two people can actually be more concerning for a dog, versus having people around all the time, and then you’re just working in that environment.

Those are some of the “how a typical day goes,” and you end up sitting outside your car and you meet your parking lot neighbors, because you usually don’t know a lot of people, especially if you go out of town. Of course I know a lot more, and everybody does as you go to more and more trials, but it’s not like you go with your friend who also entered, because the odds of two people getting in, most of it’s a lottery system, is not likely, so you’re usually traveling by yourself and meeting new people. It’s a good question you asked, because it is a very different trial day compared to other sports.

Melissa Breau:You mentioned in there how hard it is to get into trials, and looking through some of the webinar description and some other stuff, it seems like maybe that leads people to sign up for a chance to compete even if they’re not sure they’re really entirely ready. How can a handler ensure their team is truly ready to trial? What advice do you have there?

Julie Symons:I would say luckily at least I know my students are prepared to enter. I’m always happy when some of them are even unsure if they’re ready, and I assure them that they are in most cases. They have the skills, they may be concerned about the level of difficulty or the differences, and I’m also proud of some of my students who realized,I shouldn’t move up in AKC, because you can get your novice title on the weekend and move up in the Sunday afternoon trial, but you might not have taught multiple hides or the second odor. So I really admire my students who realize,Why would I move up? I’m just going to run bumper legsand go home early because I don’t have those skills. Why would I put my dog in there?

But I do see the occasional teams, now that I can spectate in AKC, I hate to see the teams that aren’t prepared, either the handlers or the dogs, and I’m hoping it’s less of an issue. I think more of it is, as you said, getting into trials is challenging, so when you can only get into maybe two trials a year — and that’s changing, so I don’t want to scare people off with that type of cadence — but you can’t make the same mistakes in those two trials a year that you have.

Back to being ready for trialing, if you have a good foundation and you know the skills that are required at that level, I would say that you’re ready to enter. We all run into something that we haven’t expected, or just not had a good trial day, but it’s mostly just know what’s expected and make sure you have trialed in those novel situations that can prepare you, because all of the trial situations you’re going to be in are novel and new, with new people around.

Melissa Breau:I know you’ve also talked about the importance of taking inventory of training gaps and handling mistakes. How can a team do thatbeforethe actual trial, especially if, like you said, there’s maybe two trials a year that they’re going to compete in?

Julie Symons:You definitely see your training gaps. They usually surface when you’re trialing, because that’s when we’re nervous and so we’re acting a little different, or the place is novel and we just aren’t our normal selves. That’s something that we do have to, as best we can, combat that, like, develop good mental strategies and just realize that everybody’s nervous. If you go there with the idea of, depending on what your goals are, if you just go there and do your thing and not worry about passing or whatever, you actually usually do pass when you take that pressure off of yourself.

When you do trial and some of these training gaps surface, you know that by purchasing the trial video. So how you can inventory your gaps is either videoing your blind training searches, if you’re in classes or whatever, or definitely your trial video. What you can do, and this is what we did in my Shoulda Woulda class, is we had people review some trial videos that didn’t go as well. A trial I would say doesn’t go as well is if you don’t find all the hides, or if you get a no from the judge — you called an alert and the judge said no. And that’s the worst thing to hear at a nosework trial.

So you watch those videos of those experiences, and you take inventory. You say, “Oh, I was crowding my dog, I talked my dog into a hide,” or “You know, I never taught my dog to search over 4 feet, and that’s why that’s a gap I have.” By watching your trial video is where you’re going to really see those gaps, and then you literally want to write them out, list them out.

One of the neat things about that class that I didn’t really anticipate was it kind of … not forced people, but it had them go back and kind of organize their trial videos. They went back and re-watched them with a fresh set of eyes, and they said, “Wow, I sometimes don’t watch them a second time,” or “I haven’t watched all these.” It was eye-opening to them to go back and not just watch them to watch them, but to watch them with a purpose of saying, “What didn’t go well here?”

We also of course in the class go over what goes well, because we want to stay positive and be aware of how well we’re doing. But since we’re focusing on trialing better, you have to know what didn’t work when you trialed and how to not do that mistake again when you go to your next trial that you got into.

I just was reading something on Facebook that somebody said. We were like, “We always remember that one mess-up that we had, and we can’t let go of it.” And somebody said, “You know, I drove eight hours, I didn’t sleep the night before, I was busy at work, the first one in my day I just blurred an alert, and all that stress and tiredness and everything, it was over.” So we need to be in a better state, go there with the right, I guess, tools and strategies to start off the trial well.

Sometimes it’s that first search that is the most stressful, definitely, and maybe we’re going to make some mistakes. So if we just can hold it together and learn to be in that moment and having a plan, and that’s what we did in the class is people had trials coming up, it was really cool, and we said, “What are your goals? What are your goals for your next trial? What are you going to do differently? What are you going to do the same?”

These people are going to trials and passing and placing, and I’m getting goose bumps talking about it, and it was such a rewarding experience because we were looking at the trial experience not in a different way but just in a specific way to inventory and to just know it’s OK. We need to own our mistakes. Somebody actually shared with me that it was so refreshing to have this topic in the class, because every time they talked to somebody who went to a trial, they would always blame the trial site, the hide placements, the people, the dogs. Sometimes we need to own where we have training gaps and how we can improve our handling instead of blaming other things.

Melissa Breau:What were some of the common “holes,” or some examples of the holes that people discovered? Maybe if you’d just walk us through a little bit of problem-solving?

Julie Symons:Yeah — this is neat. I had a guest, a lecturer, Holly Bushard. From a judge’s perspective, she listed what she believed were the common handler mistakes. But these are my list, so if you want to know what Holly thinks, there’s definitely some overlap.

I also just had a recent judging assignment, as my first AKC judging assignment, in North Dakota. It was fun. You’re in the best seat in the house, and I was nervous because I was, like, I want my high placements to be good, and I want the dogs to be able to find them.

So this is what I saw there, as well as I see when I’m teaching. I think the number one hole that we have is not covering the search area. Just to back up a little bit, sometimes your gaps are your handling. Our handling is the problem. If you cleaned up some of your handling, then that’s going to go better. Some of the other, and I can get to those later, are actually your dog’s skills. Those are the types of gaps that we would find: our handling and our dog’s skills.

The number one hole is not covering the search area. What happens is our dog shows interest in an area, and it could be pulling odor, which means odor has blown, maybe you even found that hide, but then it also collected further down into an area. Or you say, “This would be such a great place for a hide,” and your dog maybe showed a little bit of interest, maybe it wasn’t because of picking up some odor there, and you’re sure there’s something there, so we stay there and we stay there and we stay there.

I just did a class recently, and most of the people in the class stayed about a minute and a half in one-fourth or third of the search area, having not even covered the rest of the area, and there was no hide there. I always tell people, “If there was a hide there, your dog would have found it within a minute and a half, and even if there was a hide and they didn’t, you need to leave, cover it, and you can always go back.”

So that’s the number one. I saw that at the trial, not very many, there were a few teams that got convinced that there was a hide somewhere, and every dog that left that area and walked about 8 feet found the other hide. So they just were convinced, and you just need to cover your search area. And sometimes I think people are nervous, they don’t realize the search area, sometimes you don’t get a walkthrough, or it’s covered so fast that you forget, and again, when you’re nervous, our mind’s a little fuzzy. I have actually asked during a search when I was trialing, “Remind me, is this in the search area,” so that in case I forget, to make sure that I am covering it.

The second thing that I notice a hole in training is crowding our dogs. Again, when we get nervous, I’m not sure why we do this, but we stand closer to our dog. Maybe it’s a security thing for us too, but what happens is you could be affecting the dog’s access to a hide. You could actually be blocking a hide or affecting the airflow. But what generally that says to the dog is because when we’re training and we know where the hide is — this is actually one of my topics in my current class, Nosework Coaching — is we need to be good actors when we are running known hides. When we know where the hide is, almost everybody is fishing food out of their pocket. I catch myself doing that. And so then at a trial, when you walk in, because you’re nervous, you’re crowding your dog, the dog goes,I smell odor, and my handler’s coming in really close to me, and I’m a little nervous with this environment, and the dog offers some type of an indication and you call it. So you talk your dog into a false alert by crowding your dog, because to the dog it contextually can mean,Oh, this is normally when I get fed because I find something.

The third thing which plays into that is you can talk your dog into a hide. That’s a very common mistake because you’re convinced that somewhere you’re crowding your dog, you’re nervous, and sometimes our dogs give a little bit weaker indications at a trial and we can so easily talk our dogs into a hide.

The last thing I came up with, there’s many more, but the more difficult one that I’m seeing, I see in training and when I was judging, is when to let your dog drive the search and when you need to intervene. That’s why I always say that we’re 50 percent a teammate to our dog — we both have half of a role in the job to do. Sometimes it’s better to let the dog drive, and then there’s times when you have to intervene and get the dog to a different search area, or cover an area, or refocus them if they’re distracted. We won’t always get this right, but what I generally see, I know where the hide is because I placed it, and the dog is heading right to the hide, but the handler goes, “Oh, you didn’t cover these chairs over here.” Now, that’s not necessarily a bad decision, because maybe you have a dog that doesn’t have time to search the whole area twice. You need to cover this area. But it happens more than not where that area was cold and the dog was going right to odor and you just pulled him off.

It’s not the easiest call to make in the moment, but I also did this in one of my Elite trials where Savvy was going to a hide. I pulled her off, but when I took her back to where I went, she found a hide and ended up finding all the hides in that search area. So even if you pull your dog, I’m not talking about literally some dogs, the dogs are building a sign that says, “The hide is here,” and you pull your dog off. I’m talking about your dog is working their way toward the area where the source is, because they’ve picked up odor, and then you interrupt them on their way and say, “No, come check here.” Sometimes that works in your favor, but sometimes it’s, “Oh shoot, the dog was headed right to source.”

So sometimes I feel like if the dog is actually working and moving, and you can tell, some dogs will pick up speed because they pick up odor, and again, we’re not going to always get that right, but it’s something that we need to, I think, continually improve in when to intervene and when to let the dog drive.

And again, by videoing and by reviewing that, that’s how you’re going to progress with that, and maybe getting another set of eyes to review. I have some of my colleagues review my videos, because I don’t go to a regular trainer, or a training buddy, just somebody else that can view your work and say, “Hey, did you notice you did this?” can be very helpful.

Melissa Breau:Are there other issues that usually are overlooked in training, and even when prepping, that tend to pop up just in that trial situation?

Julie Symons:I think the main thing, if you truly are prepared, you know the rules, the thing that tends to pop up is a novel situation, a surface you never got your dog on before, or a distractor that they’ve purposely put in a container, or even an unintentional distractor in the environment. That’s usually something that pops that can catch you off guard, and of course in that area you want to train in as many novel locations with as many novel distractors as possible. You’re not going to ever train for everything, but as we know, as long as you generalize, for the most part, and when the dog has confidence with the job, they do overcome these novel situations.

But I noticed with my dog Savvy, I didn’t realize one year she had no problem going across a laquered gym floor, but the following year she bellied to the ground. I think it was a visual thing, with age, maybe, I don’t know, and I’ve had to work that afterwards.

Melissa Breau:I want to shift from talking about trialing to, I guess, the other end of the spectrum — those early steps. I know we’re in the middle of … recording this, we’re in the middle of the June session right now, and you’re teaching Intro to Nosework this session, and then next session you have Intro to Handler Scent Discrimination in August. I wanted to ask you what the difference is between those two classes.

Julie Symons:They’re quite similar in the approach, I mean, a target odor is a target odor. So we teach a target odor pretty similarly. We do use the same games, very similar games, that make sense for each of the areas.

With HD there’s just some different considerations, like, is it a problem searching or training in your area where you live and spend a lot of time in it, ended up not being a problem. But what I found was that I did a lot of nosework searches in my house so that sometimes I could tell my dog was like,I’m looking for oil, and I don’t know I’m supposed to be looking for your scent. So we worked through that basically with the two different target odors. We developed different start line cues and different search strategies.

I think the biggest difference between the two is I go into handler discrimination with a different search strategy, a different start line. One of the different strategies is I’m going to probably direct my dog a little bit more, because handler scent is going to be heavier and it’s going to drop, so dogs are going to pick that up more low. Also the hide placements, they’ll go as high as the oil searches, so your dog generally doesn’t have to, depending on the dog’s size, they don’t have to search as high.

So those are the different things. And I think the biggest difference is just our brain realizing that our dogs can find our handler scent just as easily as oil, but they disperse into the area differently, and dogs have to be a lot closer to the handler scents, I found with watching many dogs run, than they do in oil searches.

Melissa Breau:Are there additional skills that the dogs need to learn specifically for handler scent discrimination? Is that an issue for it?

Julie Symons:I haven’t noticed that there was a need for a new skill as much as we need to train HD a little bit more frequently to solidify the understanding. We have to stay with it, and then if I were at a trial, I would have to refresh and remind them. Whereas oil, at the point where my dogs are, if I just did a real cursory session before a trial, they’re going to be pretty strong.

The other thing I’ve noticed with HD, though, is it sounds kind of strange, but the dog really has to be using their nose. I think with nosework, oil is so strong, and it’s so different for a dog to learn wintergreen or birch that they just notice it, like,I know there’s something about this funny-smelling birch over here, so they pick that up. But when you start doing handler scent, we start with gloves and dogs want to retrieve them, if they’re retrievers or they’ve done tracking.

So there’s, I think, with handler discrimination there’s a little bit of context overlap, but it’s doable to train across the different sports. They just have to get past the context that you normally think it is. It’s a little different, and we have some really neat games to work through those, like put the socks right in the bowl if the dog wants to retrieve them, because the dog has never seen a sock in a bowl in tracking or in obedience scent articles. So we just need to get them to use their nose, and if they want to retrieve the sock, then we actually start getting it covered inside of a container. That’s generally the difference.

I do a neat little thing that’s different is a lot of people pair a food with the odor, it’s very common with scent articles, but I’ve found the pure shaping of only the target odor, so what I do is to get dogs to actually use their nose when they have four or five socks, because in handler discrimination we use a cotton sock or glove. I rub food on the cold items, completely opposite of one of the methods, and I tell you, it works wonderful, because the item with your scent on it happens to get food crumbs and food smell on it because we’re refreshing it with our food hands and dropping crumbs on it and stuff, so what becomes unique about a hot sock is that they are cotton, they all have some food smudge on it, but only one of them has your scent, and it gets the dog using their nose. Even with scent work with oil, I find some dogs we have to kick-start them using their nose, not their eyes, not thinking the container is a pivot box or what to do with a box. But generally, and I find it more with handler discrimination, where we need to find a way to jumpstart their seeking sense over their retrieving.

Melissa Breau:Are false alerts more common when training handler scent discrimination, especially since so often we’re probably training in a “usual” training environment where maybe handler scent is all over?

Julie Symons:I thought that was the case from training at home. I did find when I went outside into the fresh air and I was doing exteriors with this little, tiny cotton ball, I was amazed at how well the dogs did. I think the airflow probably helped, and maybe being outside of where I live. But I never had my dog truly false. They would false where I had placed the hide just before it, since I’m lingering handler scent.

I think false alerts are comparable across the two, and I would say if you’re not prepared for handler discrimination, but you’re a nosework dog and you enter a trial too soon and the dog sees these boxes out, which contextually for years has meant oil, and you send your dog out there and they’re thinking,I’m looking for oil, and they just aren’t clear that it’s your handler scent, and they might false because they can’t find anything. And then there is a judge’s scent there, and I do think sometimes they false for the other handler’s scent, if that’s not thoroughly trained, because it’s sometimes hard to get access to other people scenting socks for you.

But in general I’m going to switch the other way and say in nosework oil work we do containers for the rest of the dogs’ lives, and in handler discrimination for AKC you only do containers for Novice and then you’re out of there. You get three legs in Novice, and it’s like everybody has a party because we want to get out of the boxes with our socks, and we get into interior searches and we get that scent outside of a box. Whereas in nosework oil searches, you have container searches in every level, and I do believe containers have the highest false alert rate, and because boxes become such a context of being reinforced, so dogs who are nervous or unsure, or if there are distractors, they do tend to false on containers. So I think it’s comparably they have the risk of false alerts.

Melissa Breau:I know the class discusses both UKC and AKC. I was curious what some of the differences are in the different venues.

Julie Symons:UKC only does HD in a box, so they never move to scent outside a box, and in Novice it’s only your scent. There’s no discrimination with the judges having a scent out there. Another thing that’s different with UKC, actually similar to SDDA in Canada, is you have to indicate your dog’s alert behavior. In UKC you also have to say what your search command is, how you’re going to cue your dog to search, and that might be how they start, maybe they start the timer, I’m not sure.

In the Novice class they don’t judge that part, but you still have to provide it. When you get into Advanced and Excellent, they are going to judge you on that you used the search command you said that you do, and that your dog alerted in the way in that you expect to call it.

Those other search levels, though, every box has a discrimination scent, so in Advanced, the judge puts a scented glove of theirs in eleven of the boxes and yours is the hot in the twelfth. In the Advanced level, each of the competitors that are there with you provide their scented sock, and they’re all out there when you search. So everyone else’s sock is out there, and they must group them by groups of twelve or whatever.

I haven’t trialed in UKC, there’s just none in my area. So it’s kind of neat that that’s a little different. But then that ends there. They don’t search for this outside the box.

Melissa Breau:That’s all super-interesting. I’ve got one last question, though, here for you, and it’s a little bit different. It’s a new question that I’m asking returning guests each time they’re on the podcast, because hopefully it’s a question that you can actually answer more than once and have a different answer. My question is, what’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training?

Julie Symons:I thought about this, and because I’m now training more locally, and I have either returned to sports I used to train or I’m extending into some other areas, is that dog training is dog training, and no matter what sport you do, or if it’s a pet class or a puppy class, you have the same foundation skills. You need the same skills and concepts as your foundation. So many of them apply to other sports.

I always knew that, but since I started delivering the curriculum and talking to different groups of people that are coming in with different goals, I’m teaching the same thing. I’m teaching the same thing to them as a foundation. That was something that I very recently was reminded of — how it’s not really that different what you need across the different sports, and even for a pet dog, but it’s acclimating, it’s your mechanics, it’s building your dog’s motivators, it’s having good cue control. All of those things are common across all of the sports.

Melissa Breau:Excellent. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Julie!

Julie Symons:You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.

Melissa Breau:And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with Donna Hill to talk about owner handler trained service dogs and teaching a recall.

Don’t miss it! It if you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Sue Yanoff graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y, in 1980.

After three years in private practice, she joined the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty, she completed a 3-year residency in small-animal surgery at Texas A&M University and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at the Colonial Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. She then retired from there in December 2009 — her on-call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends!

The following month, she started working for Shelter Outreach Services, a high-quality, high-volume spay-neuter organization. About the same time, Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician, to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center, in Genoa, N.Y. The practice is limited to performance dogs. That means that’s basically all she does these days, performance dogs, so she knows her stuff.

She also teaches a class on Canine Sports Medicine for Performance Dog Handlers here at FDSA.

Melissa Breau:This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Sue Yanoff.

Sue graduated from Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y, in 1980.

After three years in private practice, she joined the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. While on active duty, she completed a 3-year residency in small-animal surgery at Texas A&M University and became board certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

She retired from the Army in 2004, after almost 21 years on active duty. After working for a year on a horse farm in Idaho, she returned to Ithaca to join the staff at the Colonial Veterinary Hospital as their second surgeon. She then retired from there in December 2009 — her on-call schedule was interfering with those dog show weekends!

The following month, she started working for Shelter Outreach Services, a high-quality, high-volume spay-neuter organization. About the same time, Sue joined her colleague, a physical therapist and licensed veterinary technician, to start a canine sports medicine practice at the Animal Performance and Therapy Center, in Genoa, N.Y. The practice is limited to performance dogs. That means that’s basically all she does these days, performance dogs, so she knows her stuff.

She also teaches a class on Canine Sports Medicine for Performance Dog Handlers here at FDSA.

Hi Sue, welcome back to the podcast!

Sue Yanoff:Hi Melissa, it’s good to be back.

Melissa Breau:I’m excited to chat. To start us out and refresh our memories a little bit, can you share a bit about the dogs that you have at home now?

Sue Yanoff:Yes. I have two Beagles. The older Beagle is almost 13, and she’s retired from everything except hiking and having fun. She’s a breed champion, she has her UD, her Rally Excellent MX MXJ and TD.

My younger Beagle, Ivy, is 6. Most people know her from FDSA classes. She’s also a breed champion. She has her MACH. She recently finished her CDX and we’re working on Utility. She has her Rally Novice and a TD.

Melissa Breau:That’s a lot of titles there, lady. Congrats.

Sue Yanoff:Thank you.

Melissa Breau:So we went back and forth a bit before this call on topics to talk about today, and I want to start out by just talking about some of the basics. What is the difference between a sports specialist and a regular vet?

Sue Yanoff:In veterinary medicine, in order to call yourself a specialist, you have to meet certain requirements, and that includes completing a residency in whatever area you’re a specialist in, passing a very long and difficult certifying examination, and being board-certified by the specialty board that oversees your specialty. So if you’re a specialist in internal medicine, it’s the American College of Veterinary and Internal Medicine. If you’re a specialist in surgery, it’s the American College of Veterinary surgeons. So to call yourself a specialist, you have to be certified, board certified, by one of these specialty organizations. Now, a lot of people can be very good at something and not have gone through all the requirements of being able to call themselves a specialist. But a sports specialist basically is somebody that has extra training and experience in that particular area. Regular veterinarians might be very good at sports medicine, but they can’t call themselves a specialist. But, in general, regular veterinarians are general practitioners and they have to be good at everything, so it’s very hard to be good at everything and specialize in any one area. I used to be a general practitioner, I have a lot of respect for general practitioners, I couldn’t do what they do, but that’s the difference between a regular vet, a general practitioner, and a specialist.

Melissa Breau:One of the things I’ve heard you talk about a little bit before is this idea of a good sports medicine exam. What’s really involved in that? What does that look like?

Sue Yanoff:A good sports medicine exam, like any good exam, starts with a patient’s history. It’s very important to get a good history because a lot of times we don’t have a history that a dog is lame. We have a history that the dog’s performance is deteriorating. Their times are little slower, they might be knocking bars or popping weaves. Sometimes they might be a little reluctant to jump into the car. So it all starts with a good history, which takes time.

And then a sports medicine exam involves examining the whole dog and not just one leg. When I was an orthopedic surgeon, I often would just examine the leg that the dog was lame on. We knew which leg was a problem, I’d examine that leg, say, “Here’s the problem, here’s what we need to do,” and that was the extent of the exam. With a sports medicine exam, I examine the whole dog — the neck, the back, all four legs, even if I know which leg the dog is lame in, which oftentimes we don’t know which leg the dog is lame in, so I examine the entire dog.

As an orthopedic surgeon, I would mostly concentrate on bones and joints. For a sports medicine exam, it’s really important to look at the muscles and tendons and ligaments, which often are injured.

So it’s just a different way of doing the exam. It’s much more complete, it takes more time, and to do a good sports medicine exam I think you need more than a 20-minute office visit, which is often difficult for general practitioners to do.

Melissa Breau:A lot of the time, people have a dog that comes up lame or has an ongoing issue and they aren’t really sure what the cause is. We talked a little about regular vets, they might even take their dog to that regular vet, and the vet does what they normally do, they get an “all clear,” but they’re still seeing signs of pain. I guess what stood out to me from your last answer was this idea that maybe it’s a little more subtle when we’re talking about a performance dog. Handlers may notice the more subtle signs of pain. What should they do in that kind of situation? How can they find out what’s actually going on?

Sue Yanoff:There’s two ways to handle that. Oftentimes the regular vet doesn’t find anything because, it’s as you say, it’s very subtle, or they’re actually not looking in the right place.

And oftentimes dogs will get better with what I call “the standard conservative treatment,” which involves restricted activity, no running, no jumping, no playing with other dogs, no training, leash walks only. When I say “restricted activity,” I usually mean a lot more restriction than most people think.

And then put them on some type of pain medicine, anti-inflammatory medicine. I like to use NSAIDs; non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are a good first start. Oftentimes with a minor injury, if you treat them with restricted activity and NSAIDs, they will often get better, so there’s nothing wrong with handling the situation that way. But if they’re still seeing signs of pain after doing that, then they really need to seek out a specialist to find out what’s going on.

When I say “a specialist,” I usually mean somebody who is either a board-certified surgeon that does a lot of orthopedics, or a board-certified sports medicine vet — and we’ll talk about what that means later — or somebody that has some advanced certification and training in sports medicine and rehab. We would like to hope that one of those specialists can do a good exam and try to pinpoint what the problem is, because, as you know, you’ve also heard me say, we need a diagnosis.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with treating generically for a minor injury, and a lot of dogs will get better if you do that. But if they don’t, we really need to have a better idea of what’s going on, what’s the diagnosis, what are we treating, and are we treating it appropriately.

Melissa Breau:What if the dog is given a diagnosis and a treatment plan, and the treatment plan just doesn’t seem to be doing the trick? The dog doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Sue Yanoff:In that case, if the diagnosis is not correct, which happens — it even happens to me, and I could give you an example of a case that I sent for referral a few weeks ago — or the treatment plan is not appropriate … I find what’s more common is the clients that I see, if they have been to another vet, or even another specialist, they have not been given a diagnosis. I often will ask a client, “What did your vet say is wrong?” and they say, “Well, they didn’t really say.” So that’s a problem right there. If they’re given a diagnosis, that’s great. Oftentimes my clients aren’t even given a diagnosis. And if the treatment plan doesn’t seem to be helping, either we’re not treating them appropriately, or — and this happens much more commonly with pet owners — they’re not following instructions. So if I ask you to rest the dog and restrict them, and you’re not really doing that, then the problem might not get better.

Melissa Breau:Do most dogs recover from sports-related injuries? What does that kind of “recovery” usually look like? You just talked a little bit about what you mean when you say “rest a dog.” Do you usually recommend rehab of some sort? Can you talk a little bit about how all that works?

Sue Yanoff:Sure. That’s a good question, several good questions. In my practice, yes, most dogs recover from sports-related injuries. Now, there are some things, like if it’s a chronic degenerative disease like arthritis or lumbosacral disease, then the dog is not ever going to recover fully. We can only manage the symptoms. But for muscle and tendon injuries, and even for fractures and some things like torn cranial cruciate ligaments, yes, dogs absolutely can recover from sports-related injuries.

In our practice there’s three phases of recovery. The first is rest and restricted activity. We need to allow the injury to get better. We need to allow the injury to heal. During this phase of healing, we basically don’t do anything more than have the owners do short leash walks a couple of times a day. So there’s minimum stretching and minimum p.t. and not a lot of strengthening activities.

And then we will recheck the dog, and if the owner thinks the dog is doing better, and we don’t find as much pain as we felt on the first exam, then we will go to the second phase of treatment, which is rehab. This is where you put in your stretching and your strengthening exercises and your increased activity to build up the dog’s endurance again, and that progresses as the dog progresses, and that’s tailored to each dog.

I should say, during the initial stage of treatment we will do modalities like ultrasound, if necessary, or more commonly laser or massage and mobilization and things like that.

So the first phase is treatment, which is basically restricted activity, the second phase is conditioning, where we start to increase the dog’s activity with the goal to get them back to normal activity, and then the third stage is what we call retraining, and this is where we give the owner a program to get the dog back to competition in their sport of choice. That can take anywhere from three to twelve weeks, depending on what the injury is and how long the dog has been restricted and other things like that.

Melissa Breau:For that three to twelve weeks, you’re just talking about that last phase, right? Might take three to twelve weeks for training.

Sue Yanoff:Yes. The last phase might take three to twelve weeks. So if you have a dog with an injury like medial shoulder syndrome, the post-operative recovery period is twelve weeks, and then probably another eight to ten to twelve weeks of conditioning and rehab to get them back to normal activity, and then another ten to twelve weeks of retraining to get them back to competition. That is one of the injuries that takes a long time to get back to competition, but certainly it’s possible.

A lot of the dogs that we treat, when they get back to competition, they’re better than they ever have been because they are in excellent condition, they’re very well trained, the owner knows a lot about warming up and cooling down, and a lot of them go back to very long, successful careers.

Melissa Breau:That’s awesome. I want to shift gears a little bit. I know that I’ve heard you say on numerous occasions that pain in general is undertreated in dogs. Why do you think that is? Why does that happen?

Sue Yanoff:I think it’s because dogs can’t whine and complain like people can. And a lot of dogs don’t show strong, overt signs of pain. There are ways they can tell us subtly, but a lot of people don’t know what these signs are and don’t really think that they’re causing pain.

I’ve had a lot of clients say, when they bring the dog to me, “Well, I don’t think he’s in pain,” and I can tell you right off that if your dog is limping, 99.9 percent of the time it’s because of pain. It interests me that people know that their dog is limping but don’t think they’re in pain, because I can tell you from experience with me, when I bang my knee or stub a toe, I limp because it hurts, and when it doesn’t hurt anymore, then I stop limping. So if the dog’s limping, it’s because of pain.

But oftentimes the dogs that I see are not limping, but there are other, more subtle signs, and we often find pain when I examine the dog. I’ll move a joint in a certain way and the dog will react, or I’ll push on a certain place on the spine and the dog will react, and the reaction can be anything from something very subtle, like if they’re panting, they stop panting, or they’ll lick their lips, or they’ll look back at me. Occasionally I’ll have a dog that will yelp or whine or try to bite me, which is great, because then I know for sure that they’re in pain.

Melissa Breau:There aren’t many people who would follow “try to bite me” with “which is great.”

Sue Yanoff:Yeah, right. Usually, I can get out of the way fast enough, because I haven’t been bitten yet doing a sports medicine exam. I can’t say that for any other type of exam.

But we miss signs of pain, and then it’s not treated because, again, people think,Well, she’s not in that much pain, so she’ll be OK. What I was taught in vet school — and I graduated 38 years ago — is, this was common back then, is, “We don’t want to treat the pain, because if we treat the pain, the dog will be too active.” There’s even veterinarians and people that believe that today: Let’s not treat the pain because we don’t want them to be too active.

But we know that’s not true. Anybody that has a high-drive sports dog, or even a dog that wants to chase a ball or chase a squirrel, they’re going to do it whether they have pain or not, and then worry about the pain later.

That’s why I think that pain is undertreated in dogs. It’s either not recognized, or people don’t think it’s that important.

Melissa Breau:What’s your approach? How can you tell if pain is the problem, and then what do you usually do about it?

Sue Yanoff:My approach is, if the dog is coming to see me, whether they’re limping or it’s a performance issue, it is very likely due to pain, and it’s likely due to pain because of an injury.

As I said, there are a few things that will make a dog limp that’s not due to pain. but that really has nothing to do with sports medicine. So limping is an obvious sign of pain, crying and whining, obviously, or shifting the weight off the leg, or stiff when they’re getting up. Those are pretty obvious things that people can observe in their dog at home.

But then there are some less-obvious signs that people might not notice, like if your dog normally stretches a lot when they get up in the morning, and they’re not stretching as much as they used to, that could be a sign of pain. You know how when your dog shakes the water off of them they shake their whole body? Well, some dogs will shake half their body, and that might be a sign that the body part they’re not shaking is painful. They might come out of their crate a little slower, they might be reluctant to go up and down stairs, they might not want to play as much with the other dogs, they might be more grumpy with the other dogs, they might have a slight personality change.

In my webinarChronic Pain, I listed nineteen signs of pain in dogs, and there’s probably more, so I think sometimes handlers need to listen to their dogs. Certainly performance issues can be a sign of pain, and we’ve discussed this before. A lot of people will blame a dog’s reluctance to jump, or going around a jump, or not listening, to being naughty and they try to fix it with training, but it could be that the dog is painful and that’s why they don’t want to do that thing.

Melissa Breau:I know if I over-exert myself, I tend to get a little bit sore, and I’ve certainly seen my own dogs, if we do something a little over the top one day, they might be a little less …

Sue Yanoff:Active.

Melissa Breau:Yes, or sore, the next day. So I’d assume it’s the same for dogs. If a dog is just a bit sore, or seems a bit sore the day after a trial, at what point do you start to worry that it might be something more serious than just that?

Sue Yanoff:I think it’s something that has to go on for a while. All of us have had dogs who were out hiking, or after a trial, and they’re favoring a leg, or they’ll step on something and yelp and hold their leg up and then they’re fine, and the next day they’re fine, and that’s OK with me. Or if they’re a little bit stiff and sore the day after trial, especially if they’re a little bit older, especially if it’s a four-day trial, then I would just rest the dog, give them a day off, and if they’re fine after that, then I wouldn’t worry. But if they continue to show problems, if the soreness continues, as we talked about, or if performance deteriorates, or if it comes and goes, so you rest them for a day or two and then they’re fine, and then you go back to normal activity, and then in another week or so, or a month or so, the same thing happens, and then you rest them for a few days and then they’re fine, at that point either they’re not getting better, or if it comes and goes, that’s when you should maybe look further.

Melissa Breau:You recently gave a whole webinar where you talked about pain management, and you talked quite a bit about some of the drug options that are out there. What do you wish more handlers knew when it came to pain meds? Could you share one or two things that come to mind?

Sue Yanoff:I know a lot of people are reluctant to give their dogs pain meds, and I think those are mostly people that have high pain thresholds and so they don’t take pain meds themselves until it’s really, really bad.

I have a very low pain threshold. I’m a wimp, so if I have pain or soreness, I’m taking drugs. And I assume that all dogs are like me, that they’re pain wimps and they need meds. Now there are some dogs that we all know, Labs and Border Collies come to mind, that they can have a lot of pain and still will do their thing because they’re so driven. But just because they will doesn’t mean they should, and just because they seem to tolerate the pain well doesn’t mean they should.

So I think what I would like the handlers to know is just because you wouldn’t take pain meds for certain pain doesn’t mean that it’s OK to not give your dog pain meds, because I think we need to address their pain, since they can’t tell us how bad it is.

The other thing I want people to know are there are more drugs out there than NSAIDs. NSAIDs, I think, are really good drugs, but some people are scared because they can have serious side effects — not often, but they can. But I want them to know that NSAIDs for most dogs are great, that there are several different NSAIDs available, so if one NSAID doesn’t help your dog, or your dog has an adverse reaction to one NSAID, there are other options.

One thing we talked about in the webinar that if people didn’t take it might not know: there’s a new NSAID available for dogs called Galliprant, which has a lot fewer side effects than the NSAIDs that we have been using.

Melissa Breau:If somebody has been listening to all this, or they have a dog that’s injured at some point and they think the dog might benefit from seeing a sports specialist, what’s the best way to go about actually finding one and then getting an appointment?

Sue Yanoff:There’s three different types of veterinarians that you might want to see, if you need somebody with more training and experience than your general practitioner.

The first is a board-certified surgeon. This is a veterinarian that has been certified by the American College of Veterinary Surgeons, who has the training required to meet those certification requirements. Surgeons are trained in orthopedic, neurological, and soft-tissue surgery. Once they finish their residency and go into practice, they might specialize in a particular area like orthopedics or neuro, but we’re trained in all three. So if you want to find a board-certified surgeon who has a special interest in orthopedics or sports medicine, then you can find somebody like that. You can get on the website of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons and find a specialist.

I would recommend that you find a specialist who specifically states that they have an interest in sports medicine and has several years experience, because the more we practice, the better we get, because, to tell you the truth, I’ve learned the most from the diagnoses that I’ve missed and referred for a second opinion and go,Oh, I didn’t know that was a problem. Now I know.

The second type of specialist is a board-certified sports medicine vet. This is a veterinarian that has been certified by the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, and again, my recommendation is to look for somebody that has several years experience in the specialty. And for the sports medicine specialty I kind of like it if you find a veterinarian who actually does some sports with their dogs, because I think you get a whole different perspective on sports medicine when you actually do some of these sports.

The third type of veterinarian, who can’t really be called a specialist but has some extra training in sports medicine rehab, is a veterinarian who has a certification called CCRT, which stands for Certified Canine Rehabilitation Therapist. This is somebody that has some extra training through online classes, through three weeks of in-person classes, and while the training is not as extensive as a board-certified specialist, at least they have some advanced training.

The point I want to make is just because somebody is a specialist doesn’t mean that they’re good at what they do. You would think that they would be pretty good, but not always, and just because somebody is not a specialist doesn’t mean that they’re not good. So if you have no place to start, those are good places to start. I like for you to get recommendations from somebody who has seen the sports medicine vet, whose dog has been treated successfully, and start there. But if you don’t have a recommendation from somebody, then I think looking at the websites of American College of Veterinary Surgeons or American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehab, or finding a veterinarian with a CCRT certification is a good place to start.

Melissa Breau:Excellent. I’ve got one more question here for you, Sue. I’ve replaced the three questions at the end of every interview with a new question for repeat guests, so as a final question I want to get back to dog training. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to training?

Sue Yanoff:I like this question a lot because I have probably ten answers for that. But having just come back from the FDSA camp, I think the lesson that came to mind first and I think is very important and that is foundation. That’s getting back to the foundations. Whether you’re having trouble with something or whether you just want to have an easy training session with your dog, get back to the foundations.

Melissa Breau:Excellent. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Sue!

Sue Yanoff:Thanks, Melissa. It was fun, as always.

Melissa Breau:And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in!

We’ll be back next week with Nancy Tucker to talk about behavior change and why it can be so hard.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

In previous years, we’ve shared the audio from Denise’s opening talk, but unfortunately the camera this year didn’t do a great job picking up her voice, so instead we’re just going to talk through all the themes from camp.

Melissa Breau:This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Denise Fenzi about FDSA Training Camp 2018!

In previous years, we’ve shared the audio from Denise’s opening talk, but unfortunately the camera this year didn’t do a great job picking up her voice, so instead we’re just going to talk through all the themes from camp.

Hi Denise. Welcome back to the podcast!

Denise Fenzi:Hi Melissa. It’s always nice to be here.

Melissa Breau:For anyone who is new to the podcast or to FDSA, can you share a little bit about camp? What is it? Why is it awesome?

Denise Fenzi:Well, camp is probably the highlight of my year in relation to FDSA. For starters, we have so much going on at any given time. I think we had 15 or 16 instructors this year, and we run six sessions at a time. So if you come, you have a whole lot of opportunity to see pretty much anything, and we cover a lot of dog sports now, you know, nosework and obedience and behavior, and it goes on and on.

Probably the thing that stands out for me is how consistent all of the instructors are with things we really care about, the wellbeing of the dog, and at the same time how different we all are in what we care about and where we choose to put our energy. So it’s a pretty amazing experience for me and I think for most of our participants as well.

Melissa Breau:I definitely agree. I feel like a lot of seminars and things, as an attendee you go and at the end you feel,OK, I’ve got some stuff to work on. Whereas I feel like the biggest takeaway for me from camp was the end of it I heard over and over and over again, “I’m so proud of my dog. They did awesome this weekend.” And I really think that can be attributed to the staff and the way the instructors work with the students. I think it just makes them feel good about their relationship with their dog.

Denise Fenzi:Yeah. I think the corollary to that is that the instructors spend a lot of time saying, “I’m just so proud of my students.” Because the dogs got that from somewhere. Those dogs didn’t just show up being amazing. They’re amazing because the people who work with them have spent so much energy making training a wonderful experience. I’m so proud of my instructors because my instructors give so much to their students, and I’m so proud of my students because they give so much to their dogs. So it’s an amazing cycle for all of us.

Melissa Breau:This was the fourth annual FDSA Training Camp, and each year, camp has a theme. Do you mind sharing what the theme was for this year?

Denise Fenzi:This year we did Face Your Fears. So many students, they want to do it right, they care so much, and that’s amazing, but sometimes it’s also a little paralyzing, and what if? What if my dog pees in the ring? What if … you can fill in any blank you want, people are all over the map. And so I think that is something that is holding us back. So our theme this year was Face Your Fears. What can we do to allow us to succeed?

Melissa Breau:Do you mind … can you share the story of the dream that inspired all of that?

Denise Fenzi:That was not our original theme. We changed it. What tends to happen each year is something happens during the year that sparks a topic. So, for example, the first year was The Red Dress. That was because one of the students drew a picture of me which is often associated with the school, it’s our logo. But she put me in a red dress with heels, and it was kind of cute and fun and a lot of people talked about it, so what the hell, I dressed up in that outfit, which was actually quite hard, but it was fun.

The second year, we did a lot of conversation about the idea of ripples and bubbles, so the idea that you want to go out in the world and make change, and at the same time you’ve really got to have a safe space, so that’s a bubble that you hide in, and so I dressed up as a mermaid and represented that theme.

The third year, we had talked a lot about advocating for your dog, which is very much a focal point at FDSA, as we just talked about, and so I dressed up as a superhero, Wonder Woman.

This year, I’m not going to tell you the original theme because, who knows, we might come back to it. But I had a dream, not an amazing dream, just a regular dream, but it was something of a nightmare. What happened was at first I showed up for camp and there was some fellow teaching a lecture, a lab, and everybody was there, and he was somebody I did not know, and all of the students were riveted by him and he was teaching them about football. I remember being a little bit like,Wow, that’s different. I didn’t expect somebody I don’t know to be here teaching football, but I’ll figure it out later. And then I went outside and I saw all of these lions in cages, and I thought,I really have to talk to my instructors about telling me if they’re going to do something like that. But I was kind of OK with that too. I’m pretty easygoing. Then I came back in and looked at the clock and I realized I was about to teach, and I looked down and I was wearing a towel. I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. Of those events, a stranger teaching at camp football to the students and lions in cages outside, those didn’t particularly bother me. But being in a towel bothered me very much. And I did teach, by the way. I think in my dream I went ahead and taught. I don’t remember how it went beyond that.

But as I brought that up on the alumni list and I talked to the students about that dream and said, “Oh, I must be anxious about camp,” and that led to an amazing discussion where people talked about things that had happened to them for real at dog shows. Funny things, mostly. Well, it depends — funny is from your point of view. It’s not funny when your skirt falls off. It is funny when somebody else’s falls off. But the thing that came back to me is that people overcame those experiences and did continue to show, because they’re on the alumni list. They’re still in the community.

That led to my thinking about how is it that some people are able to face the fears that have happened, the clothing failures, and how other people are really more worried about what might happen, and how much of that is centered around the issue of being embarrassed. It’s not physical harm that most people were worried about. It’s emotional harm. So that was the dream that inspired our theme, and that was where we went with our discussion.

Melissa Breau:I thinkit’s funny thatyou say of the three things, the thing that bothered you most is talking in a towel, so you actually made that happen. For anybody that wasn’t there, Denise came out in a Pac-Man towel.

Denise Fenzi:I did, yeah. I think next year I’m going to go for a lot of clothing. It’s a little easier.

Melissa Breau:Fair enough. During your opening talk, you had three tips for helping to deal with embarrassment. Can you rehash those for us?

Denise Fenzi:Sure. The first one is a little bit of an understanding of biology. When you are anxious, your body releases a variety of hormones that tells you, “Oh my goodness, you’re having an emotion.” But what’s interesting is those hormonal experiences are the same if you’re excited or anxious. It’s your brain that tells you, “I’m really excited because this amazing thing is going to happen,” or “I’m really anxious because this horrible thing might happen.”

That’s actually a fascinating and powerful thing to know, because if you know that, then you actually have a lot of control over the situation. So rather than saying, ‘I’m really anxious about showing my dog. She might pee in the ring,” you have the option of saying, “I’m really excited about showing my dog. I’ve never done this before. This is going to be new.”

And admittedly you have to do a little mental gymnastics, because our natural tendency, I think in particular for women, is to assume anxiety maybe when it really isn’t anxiety. Maybe we really are excited. They’ve done some really interesting research on that topic that you can tell yourself “I’m excited,” and that will help you become excited as opposed to anxious. So that would be one thing I would recommend is an awareness of that, and then just keep telling yourself, “I’m so excited to be at the dog show. This is going to be amazing,” rather than “I’m so scared.”

The second thing I talked about was preparation. When you’re afraid, instead of hiding it and smushing it down in your head, pull it out. What are you concerned about? And then prepare to make those incidences less likely. So if you are afraid that your dog is going to pee in the ring, teach your dog to go to the bathroom on cue, if that’s important to you, if that will give you comfort, so that when you go in the ring that is less likely to happen. Or if you think that you might go in the ring and your dog is going to have a meltdown of whatever type, ask yourself where that is coming from and is it a legitimate concern, because if it is, there are things you can do to prepare your dog and yourself to make that less likely. Don’t turn away from the things that concern you. Address them.

The final thing I suggested was train yourself and treat yourself with the kindness that we treat our dogs. We talk a lot about criteria with our dogs. Don’t put your dogs in circumstances that will over-faze them and make them uncomfortable. Don’t put yourself in circumstances that are above your readiness.

Your first dog show does not have to be a great big show with six rings and a lot of activity. Maybe start with some video competitions or a smaller local trial or a fun match. Ease into the dog show world or the world of competition. You may never go to a dog show, but I guarantee you will be just as nervous at your first video competition when you turn on that video camera as you will at a show.

So treat yourself with some kindness and set yourself up for success, because success really does breed success. That is absolutely well researched. We know this is true for dogs and people, that when people have many successful experiences they build confidence in themselves and they are willing to keep trying and moving forward. Failure, it’s wonderful to say “Well, just get back up,” but the fact is failure has a tendency to beat people down and they don’t keep getting back up. They stop trying.

So those were my three suggestions: a little understanding of biology, prepare yourself well so that you can feel like you’ve done everything in your power, and set some criteria that will set you up for likelihood of success.

Melissa Breau:You also shared some advice on what to do if it DOES all go to hell. How would you recommend people handle that?

Denise Fenzi:I’m a pretty big fan of preparing for everything, because I find that if I have a plan for how I’m going to handle it if it doesn’t go right, so just in a very straight training sense, I have asked my dog to do something, I have asked my dog to spin, and my dog just looks at me, has never heard that in her life or his life, it’s actually important to me to already know exactly what I will do. I asked you to spin, you didn’t do it, I am going to move my hand in a way that is going to cause you to spin and make it more likely.

When I do that, what I find is two things happen. One, I am more likely to recover quickly because I’ve already made a decision about what I’m going to do. But the second thing is, in a very subtle way you send off signals to your dog that tell them you have a plan and you are in control.

So if I think it is possible that my dog might run amuck in the ring and take off, I’ve already worked on an emergency recall and I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to kneel down and call my dog to me, because standing and looking paralyzed, not only is that very, very hard on you emotionally, and your dog, it creates long-term issues. Often if I give someone a plan for when things don’t go wrong, I’ve noticed that they have this instant change in their demeanor and then they never have a chance to practice their emergency situation because the dog reads their confidence. So I absolutely believe that you should have some ideas for everything if it’s going to go right. You can’t pick every possibility, but the ones that are biggest in your head you can pick some strategies in advance.

Melissa Breau:Our shirts this year all said, “Game on,” and they had a Pac-Man theme. I’d love to hear how you came up with that, and obviously it connects to the“eating your fears” concept. So I’d love to hear where all the awesome designs come from and where the thought process occurs for that.

Denise Fenzi:Well, the school, FDSA, is quite a bit more than me. It’s many, many, many people. Teri Martin is sort of, well, she’s kind of everything, you know, she’s always right there supporting me in many ways. She is the one that came up with the idea of the Pac-Man creature eating up your fears. And then Rebecca Aube is my designer, and she’s designed all of the T-shirts for camp. She took Teri’s ideas and said, “I can run with that.” There’s always a process of back and forth, so we had power-ups. Eating the fruits in the real game of Pac-Man gives you power, so for us, eating up your fear, your anxiety, your worries. So it’s a cumulative process and effort of many people on our team to come up with these ideas.

Melissa Breau:That was allfor the welcome talk or the intro talk, but you also gave a short closing talk, and your focus for that was on the importance of being happy in order to learn. I’d love to have you elaborate a bit more on that, why it’s important, and what made you talk about that.

Denise Fenzi:Well, I think most of us are aware that when we are embarrassed or afraid, we do not learn well. If something happens in a circumstance and we find ourselves embarrassed, most of us lose the next 15 or 20 minutes of the talk or the event or whatever it is, because we’re stewing. I mean, some of us lose days or months or years, even, over embarrassment. And fear is the same. When you are uncomfortable and nervous, really, fear dominates everything and we tend to focus on that.

Now, if you think about it, camp can be a very high-pressure situation for both the human and the dog. You’re standing in front of maybe a hundred people, you’re about to be taught and directed, and that’s stressful, so it’s so important that we have people as comfortable as we can possibly make them.

As a result, everyone — the instructors and the students and the dogs — we all think so much about the importance of maintaining happiness, and I know our students think about it a lot in relation to their dogs because we talk about it so much. That’s called a CER: a conditioned emotional response. We want our dogs to be conditioned to loving being with us and training and finding it fun and low stress. But the same is true for the people, and as a result, staff at FDSA and the design of camp is set up to minimize the human stress as much as possible, and to make sure that people are happy and feel loved and warm and excited to be there and understand that if they make an error, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s OK.

What I found as the years go by this becomes easier for all of us. We all become more comfortable with how this works. You could see the effects in camp. You could see that people were able to learn in real time and they were happy, so then of course their dogs are happy, and then of course the staff is happy, and again you have that circle.

I do not choose my closing speech in advance. I just talk about whatever stood out for me at camp. And it really stood out for me, was almost a bit of an epiphany for me, that CER, that conditioned emotional response, the importance of it, the importance of happiness and feeling good is just as important for the handler as it is for the dog and that we all take some responsibility for making that happen.

Melissa Breau:Of course the other thing you talk about during the closing talk every single year is the date and location for next year. I want to talk a little more about that, but first, where and when is it next year?

Denise Fenzi:All right. It is May 19 through the 21st, it’s three days, 2019, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. The location is the Lebanon Valley Exposition Center. Once again we have lots of space. We go to some trouble to ensure that we have a lot of space so that we have the best possible sound. Once again we’ll have a wide variety of instructors. We do have a few changes, I think people will be excited about that, a couple of new people coming in.

Melissa Breau:I wanted to get in a little bit moreinto what goes into choosing the location and the space and stuff like that. I know everybody at camp was pretty excited about where camp would be, but obviously choosing that location is a very involved process, and I know usually Teri is working on it pretty much as soon as one year ends, trying to plan for the next year. So how do you decide where to have camp each year? What goes into that?

Denise Fenzi:It’s actually, it’s really quite complex. Planning camp is actually a two-year cycle, so we are already picking our 2020 facility now because you have to start really far in advance.

For 2019, we have a contract signed, but I think maybe more goes into camp than people realize, and it’s a very complex thing. Just finding a facility that can host us is hard because we need large, open working spaces. Many conferences don’t have working dogs that require large open spaces. It’s just the nature of our dog sports. That alone takes a lot of space.

The second one is sound. If you’re going to run six rings at the same time, you need six distinct spaces. But you don’t want six huge spaces, because one, sound does not, it’s not as efficient to be in a huge building with a smaller number of people, and the second thing is just expense. You pay for all those large spaces.

Just logistically there are only so many places in the United States, and each one that we investigate ends up taking us several hours, once we narrow it down, and then we find something that’s just not going to work, so lack of air conditioning or no airport nearby or whatever is part of that.

Some of the criteria, we are looking for heavy student population centers because experience has taught us that people generally drive within about an eight-hour radius, although I did notice this year people are coming from further. So we’re looking for places where we already know we have a lot of students.

In addition, we are trying to rotate it around the country, sort of a north, south, east, west, but it’s not that clean because again we’re looking for population centers. So this year we’re about eight hours east of last year because we feel that we can fill that effectively at this time. We can pull people down from the northeast, it was too far for them, and we can pull people up from the southeast because it was too far for them, and hopefully we’ll also pull people in from the middle of the country, and we have an airport within about an hour. Next year we’ll probably make a more radical change the year after that and head back to the other side of the country.

It’s actually very, very difficult for us to pick locations, and we worry and we want everyone to be able to participate, but we recognize the difficulty of that. And we do generally have people come internationally, so hopefully people from Europe and, well, Europe in particular will consider coming over next year, because it’s really only about six or seven hours to get to the East Coast, so we’re trying to maximize, and Canadians tend to represent very, very well at camp, so we’re hoping they’re going to come down. They’re some lively people, those Canadians.

Melissa Breau:I’m sure they’d appreciate that. I know that you were talking about the sound thing, and a lot of the time when those threads pop up on the alumni list, people suggest places where they’ve had great nationals and things like that. I think there’s often a failure to realize what you said that not only do we need the space to have six rings essentially, but they need to be divided into their own rooms, because otherwise you get so much bleed from sounds. I know that’s been an issue in past years. And you’ve worked to remedy food issues from past years and bathroom issues from past years. There’s just so many factors. I think it’s incredible.

Denise Fenzi:We do ask. We do a survey every year and it’s incredibly valuable for us. We get feedback about what does or doesn’t work. It also comes when I read the survey that I understand that some people just don’t understand. For example, we don’t choose the caterer. Most of the time the facility tells us what our options are, so we don’t say, “We’re going to bring in pizza.” They say, “No, you’re not.” For example, that is one. They tell us where we can do it. They tell us if we can or cannot have outside alcohol. They tell us what the prices are going to be. We do not make money on those things. So we have to work within the constraints that we have, and I think people are unaware of many of our constraints. However, we always get suggestions every year that we look at and we say, “This we can do.”

So if you are really passionate about something and you don’t understand why we are ignoring you, it’s not necessarily that we think it’s not a good idea. It may be outside of our control, or there may be other expenses or other things that people are not aware of that we have to dovetail all of these things together. It’s a very complicated and rewarding experience for us.

Melissa Breau:I just have one more question on my list, but before we get to that, I wanted to give you an open choice question, for lack of a better term. Is there anything else fun or exciting going on at the academy or favorite moments from camp that you want to share?

Denise Fenzi:There’s so much. You know, you go home from camp on such a high, and I think a big part for me is this sense of wonder. I’m amazed at what FDSA is and who it is. It is the people. Where did I find a Teri and a Melissa and a Rebecca? Where did I find these amazing people? So, for me, camp is really the people. Where did I find these amazing students? The volunteers — they’re fantastic. They work so hard, they’re focused, they just do so much.

I think the thing I flew home with on my airplane as I came home was that sense of people, how amazing people can be, if you’re looking for what’s going right. Camp is a great example of what went right, and that will hold me probably for months. I’ll stay excited about that.

Melissa Breau:So I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve been trying something new at the end of each episode. The three questions at the end of every interview were definitely one of my favorite things early on, but it obviously doesn’t make sense to ask them over and over when people come back. So I’ve come up with a new question for returning guests, and I think you’re the second or third person I’ve had the chance to ask it. What is a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training?

Denise Fenzi:This is one I talk about a lot for other people, but it came home to roost. I would like to talk about videotaping. Has anybody not heard me tell you, “You have to videotape your work if you really want to improve.” Of course you can do it other ways, but my goodness, if you videotape and look at it — this is the second part — look at it from an outside perspective, don’t watch yourself training your dog, watch your friend training a dog, and that extra step of removal will show you things. It will allow you to relax your brain and your defensive side that says, “I know I’m doing it right,” because we all have that, and it will allow you to say, “Oh, that’s really a quick tweak here, just let’s change that little thing.”

It did kind of come home. I’ve been doing some new stuff with Brito, and I was reminded that I need to pay more attention to my basic mechanics. Many of these things are fairly muscle memory for me, but if you don’t pay attention, you will start to slide. You’ll just get a little bit sloppy. And I realized as I’m trying to teach him some new skills, I am reminded that I need to pay more attention to my mechanical skills. Think about it. You give your cue, you give your hand help if needed, you take your food out of your pocket. That simple sequence has started to blend together over time. So I would say that has been my lesson, my recent lesson that is serving me well.

Melissa Breau:Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Denise! This was great.

Denise Fenzi:Oh, it’s always great to be here. Thank you, Melissa.

Melissa Breau:And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! As a last-minute reminder, this comes out on Friday the 15th, which is also the last day to register for this session at FDSA. There are a ton of amazing classes running this term, so if you haven’t, you should go check them out. And we’ll be back next week, this time with Sue Yanoff to talk about canine sports medicine.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Amanda has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20+ years, teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between dog and handler.

She works with all styles of handling, from running with your dog to distance handling, and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and handler. She’s always looking to help bring out the best in each team.

Amanda’s handling system, “Cues for Q’s,” works off her three base cues: Upper Body Cues, Lower Body Cues, and Verbal Cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues together to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All of these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles on her own dogs.

Next Episode:

To be released 6/15/2018, featuring Denise Fenzi, talking about camp this year!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau:This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Amanda Nelson.

Amanda has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20+ years, teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between dog and handler.

She works with all styles of handling, from running with your dog to distance handling, and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and handler. She’s always looking to help bring out the best in each team.

Amanda’s handling system, “Cues for Q’s,” works off her three base cues: Upper Body Cues, Lower Body Cues, and Verbal Cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues together to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All of these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles on her own dogs.

Hi Amanda! Welcome back to the podcast.

Amanda Nelson:Hi, it’s so great to be back again.

Melissa Breau:Awesome. To start us out, can you just refresh our listeners’ memories by telling us a little bit about your dogs and what you’re working on with them?

Amanda Nelson:Technically three dogs, although one of them is my boyfriend’s. My older dog, Nargles, is 9 years old, and I’m spending most of this year getting her ready to go to the NADAC championships in the Stakes Division, which is a distance class, basically.

My young dog, Ally, is 5 years old, and this will be her first year going to championships, again hopefully in the Stakes Division. So I’ve been practicing a lot of distance stuff with them, really trying to fine-tune Nargles and build up Ally’s confidence and all that good stuff for her pushing out and doing all that good distance stuff.

And then my boyfriend, Jimmy, has Tripp that I’ve trained with him. He, too, is going in Stakes, hopefully, so it’s a whole group of them all going together, so that’s a lot of fun.

Melissa Breau:I don’t train agility with my dogs — at least not yet. I do know that most competitors who do have a lot of foundation skills they work on with dogs for jumps and tunnels and contacts. How common is it to include foundation skills for distance specifically in that “beginner” work?

Amanda Nelson:I think it’s fairly common, especially if that’s something that you’re wanting to do in the future, it’s a goal or something that you’re looking towards. I think it’s fairly easy to go ahead and incorporate those distance skills in with the foundation skills. I do it a lot with my young dogs.

With that being said, I listen to the dog quite a bit, and I don’t want to push them too much or ask for too much distance work right off the bat. But I do start incorporating some of that confidence work and some of those skills to help build up that confidence and build up that drive to want to work away from me, especially with those younger dogs, and get them used to that kind of work and that kind of distance right from the get-go.

Melissa Breau:When you’re training your own dogs, at what point do you start that, do you begin working on those distance skills?

Amanda Nelson:It really depends on the dog. Nargles, right from the very beginning, was very much into … she liked moving away from me, she liked doing the distance work. So I started incorporating it pretty much right from the start. When I started doing even my groundwork skills with her, my targeting and working with cone work and things like that, I started asking for quite a bit of distance from her because that’s really what she wanted and really what she liked.

Ally, on the other hand, who I said was 5, she is just now this year really wanting to get into that distance work. She’s just now coming into her own and thinking that maybe she would like to do something like that. So her foundation I did incorporate distance work and distance skills, but I definitely didn’t push for it or ask too much of her, just because she just wasn’t mentally quite ready. So with her, I let her tell me when she was ready to start adding more and more distance. But I still incorporate it, I guess, in her training. I just didn’t push it, I guess would be the best way to explain it.

Melissa Breau:You mentioned cones a little bit in there. What do those early steps in training look like, for those that are out there and interested?

Amanda Nelson:I start with the cones, and pretty much the early steps when I start doing foundation work, with my distance training even, the cones are great, even if your eye is not looking towards distance, you’re just looking at handling and commitment skills.

I start teaching my dogs to work with the cones — when I say “out,” that means go to the outside of the cone, “here” means come to the inside of the cone — I developed working with the cones and working my dogs on those because I didn’t have a lot of space and I still don’t, and I travel extensively without equipment. Using the cones, I can set them up at campgrounds, or I can set them up just about anywhere, and I can work my young dogs on all their distance and directional skills with four to six cones, depending on how much space I have.

So when I’m beginning with them, it basically is just, “Here, we’re going to send you out around a couple of cones,” build their confidence to go out away from me to get around those cones, and then I can also work on my handling timing, because my dog’s definitely going faster just going around a cone, as opposed to going over a jump and things like that. So it improves my timing quite a bit by using the cones, and I can also work on not only their distance skills but their directional skills as well.

Melissa Breau:How do you then take those and build on them? What are some of the intermediate steps between go around a cone, and sending to an obstacle that may be a few yards away?

Amanda Nelson:What I usually do — it’s what I did with Ally, I think again is what really helped build her confidence and build her drive to want to work away from me — is once I have my dogs doing what I call cone work, so they’re doing six cones and we’re doing a bunch of directional changes, distance work, and things like that, I’ll take the cones and I’ll place them next to jumps or hoops. They can be placed next to the wing of a jump, and because I’ve done so much foundation and value-building for those cones, when I give my dog an “out” cue, or whatever directional cue I want to use, they’re going to see that cone and go, “Oh, OK, I know that cone, I know that,” and be able to push out around that jump wing and start applying the cones to obstacles.

I can also use them in sequences. What I really like to use them for is in-between, say, a contact tunnel discrimination, so when I say “out,” they can go out tunnel, or here into the contact walk-it.

I like to start blending them in with my equipment, and it gives my dogs something that is a visual. So when I say “out,” they see that cone and like, “OK, yes, I need to go out around that cone,” and then I can start fading that cone back a little bit.

I’ve also brought them back in for my older dogs. As an example, Nargles, for some reason she’s having a brain fart on her discriminations. In her old age she’s forgotten what that means.

Melissa Breau:It happens to the best of us.

Amanda Nelson:That’s right. So in her training sessions I’ve actually brought the cones back, and I’ve put them in-between the contact and the tunnel and just helping her remember that “out tunnel” really truly does mean “out tunnel.” So they’re great for that too — to help those bring older dogs, if they need a little tuning up or something like that, to bring it back into perspective for them.

Melissa Breau:I know you mentioned “out” and “here.” Do you mind repeating which ones which way again? I know people are always interested in cues.

Amanda Nelson:My basic cues, “out” means for my dog to move out away from me, “here” means for my dog to move in towards me, just like a discrimination “out” would be out to the outside obstacle, which is usually a tunnel, and “here” would be to come to the inside obstacle. A “switch” means for my dog to turn away from me, so if they’re on my left side, they’re going to turn away from that left side. And then I have a “tight,” which is basically just my wing wrap cue when I want them to wrap a hoop, or wrap a jump, or something similar, and I need them to turn very tightly back towards me.

Those are my base cues, and I tend to blend them together. For instance, today I’m at an agility competition, and Ally needed to change directions, so I needed to give her a “switch,” which meant I needed her to turn away from me, and then I needed her to wrap the jumps. So I would say “switch,” which meant for her to turn away, and then I would say “tight,” which meant for her to wrap the jump towards me.

Melissa Breau:That’s awesome, because it really helps communicate all those different spatial things, the different directionals.

Amanda Nelson:Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Breau:I know distance is a pretty big element in the competition venue you usually compete in. Is it beneficial for dogs in other venues too? What advantages does training for distance really give an agility team?

Amanda Nelson:I definitely think it’s beneficial. A lot of venues now, I think, are all asking for more and more distance, and I think it’s beneficial no matter what agility venue you want to do with your dog, especially for the distance classes — NADAC, Chances, or Gamblers, Fast, any of that, it’s great to have those skills. Each venue asks for just a little bit of a … they’re all a little different in the distance skills they ask. But the core quality or core skill that you’re looking for is for your dog to move away from you, and so I truly think distance is great for that.

And distance is great to be able to use to get where you need to be as a handler. To be able to send your dog out away from you to go do that jump so you can get somewhere else — that, I think, is the biggest benefit of distance. Especially for me, I’m not perhaps the speediest handler in the world, so I like to use that to my advantage that I can send my dog out and away, and then I can get to where I need to go to help them on a piece of the course where they really need me to be there as a handler. So I love using distance for that.

Melissa Breau:Is this something that all teams can learn? Is it something that all teams can at least work on?

Amanda Nelson:I definitely think so. Between teaching online and teaching in person, I feel like I’ve dealt with just about every breed in the whole wide world, mixed breeds, it just feels like I’ve seen them all, which is fantastic because I love going to seminars and seeing all these different breeds. At one seminar I taught last year, in the same session I had a Great Dane and a Chihuahua and it was fantastic. It made my whole year.

But each dog is going to be a little different in how they learn. Each dog is going to be a little different in how much distance they can give. I have three Border Collies, and all three of them are vastly different in what they’re comfortable with, what distances are comfortable.

I really tend to listen to the dog, and I do believe all handler and dog teams are capable of distance. It’s just a matter of, in my opinion, confidence is the biggest thing with distance. Being clear in your cues and your dog having the confidence to perform those cues away from you is huge, and I think once you’ve crossed that bridge, once you’ve taught your dog that “When I say ‘out,’ I really mean ‘out,’” and you’ve built so much value for moving out away from you, whether it’s with the cones or whatever system you would like to use.

But once you’ve built all that confidence, and built that drive to move away from you, I think dogs really like it. I loved watching, for instance, the little Chihuahua I worked with. She just lit up. Every time her owner said “out,” she was like, “I can, I can, I can,” and her little legs were going a hundred miles an hour, and she was so excited because she got to do something all by herself sort of thing. She was so happy to go show that she really could do that. It was very cool.

Melissa Breau:I was waiting for that c-word to come up, because I know what we talked about heavily last time was the fact that confidence is such a huge component of good distance skills, and so I knew it was going to come up sooner or later. Your class on Intro to Distance — I know you’re teaching that this session, so it starts on June 1st. I can’t remember if this is coming out right before this or right after that, but would you be willing to share a little more about the class itself, what you’ll cover, maybe who would be a good fit?

Amanda Nelson:Yeah, definitely. I love this class. It’s definitely one of my favorites. I love the beginning stages of teaching distance. I love watching dogs light up when they start putting pieces together.

So this class is going to be … it covers all of my foundation work, so it’s very minimal equipment. I do think towards about Week 5, Week 6, we start using jumps and hoops, but it’s very minimal.

A lot of it is focusing on the handlers, making sure that our handlers are all using the feet in the right direction, the arms in the right direction, that the verbals match what all that should be saying, and teaching the dog to really … a lot of it, again, is confidence — building that confidence to go out around that cone, building value for the body language and the verbal cue of “out,” so every time they hear it that they light up and they want to go out do it. This class really focuses on building that up.

As far as who it’s good for, the last time I ran this class, I had a bunch of foundation, like puppies and young dogs who were just coming in and really wanting to get that foundation training right from the get-go and really wanted to build that confidence. But then I also had about three older dogs that came in, and the dogs are competing, they’re high-level competition dogs, and the dogs just weren’t giving that same spark that they were, so the students really wanted to see if this class would help bring that back, and that was a ton of fun.

So it is a foundation groundwork class, but whether, I think, you have a young dog or even an older dog who maybe you want to start working on some distance skills because maybe you haven’t previously, or want to build that confidence back up, I really like this class in that respect. The focus is all about bringing up that spark and bringing back the confidence and that push to get them to want to go out and do things all by themselves sort of thing.

Melissa Breau:This wasn’t necessarily in the questions, but I know earlier you mentioned that one of the reasons you like using your cones is because it lets you work in a fairly limited amount of space. How much space is somebody going to need to work on the exercises from this class?

Amanda Nelson:Very minimal. Like I said, towards the end of class I set up some more advanced-type exercises that have a couple of jumps, a couple of hoops, that sort of thing, but they’re more like bonus lessons. Most of the stuff is focused around the four cones, and most of the lessons that you’ll see if you sign up for the class, most everything, all my lessons are filmed, I’m in a very tiny little area. I would say maybe, oh geez, 25 feet wide maybe by 25 feet. It’s very small, if that. Enough for four cones set up. Some of the videos you can watch my progression of travels because they’re filmed in a different location almost every week. So it’s a very small little area. I think I usually recommend people have about 30 by 30 feet, somewhere in there, so they have enough room to get around. But I tend to modify any of the lessons if it doesn’t quite work for someone’s space.

Melissa Breau:Gotcha. Now, in addition to that class, you’re also teaching an agility Handler’s Choice this session. I’d love to hear a little bit about what kinds of problems students could work on if they wanted to take that class.

Amanda Nelson:Again Handler’s Choice. That’s again another favorite class. Apparently all mine I like a lot, so that’s probably a good thing.

Melissa Breau:That is a good thing.

Amanda Nelson:That’s a good start, right? I was just getting ready to say that’s my favorite class. Handler’s Choice I think is a ton of fun. There’s other instructors in the school that offer Handler’s Choice, and I always sign up for them at least at Bronze because I love seeing … in one six-week class you get to see so much stuff. It’s just so awesome.

The last time I ran Handler’s Choice we had people wanting to work on weave poles, we had distance, we had handling. I had one handler who wanted to prep for an upcoming championship, and then I had a couple of puppies that were just working on cone work. I believe one dog didn’t want to do any agility. She just wanted to focus on her start line and things like that.

So the Handler’s Choice, as long as it’s agility-related, so obviously equipment-related, you want to work on your weave poles, jumping contacts, that sort of thing. Also, skill-wise, you want to work on your directionals, distance, start line. We cover it all, as long as it’s related back into agility at some point for me.

But the Handler’s Choice I think is so much fun. Again, anytime I see an instructor in the school offering Handler’s Choice, I always sign up at Bronze because it is such a wealth of information. You get to watch all these Gold students working on a ton of things. It’s like having … if there’s ten Golds, it’s like watching ten different classes all at once. It’s fantastic. I think Handler’s Choice is fantastic.

Melissa Breau:It’s definitely, I think, one of the more undervalued classes on the schedule. Folks don’t really realize that even if they were to hire an instructor for private lessons for six weeks, compared to the cost of Gold class they’d be in a very different situation, and they’d be working once a week, not several times a week. So basically anything agility-related that’s not on the schedule specifically in the class they can come to you for.

Amanda Nelson:That is right. That’s right.

Melissa Breau:Awesome. Well, for our last question here I want to try something new, and I’m hoping it goes well. Originally we had those three questions at the end of every interview, which was one of my favorite parts of doing a call with somebody, especially asking for favorite pieces of training advice, and I used to get all kinds of great feedback on them. Now that we’ve had all the instructors on a couple of times, it makes it a little bit harder to … we don’t ask the same question over and over again. So I’ve been coming up with a new way to ask a new question for returning guests, and I think I’ve finally come up with one. You get to be the first guest to try and answer it, so no pressure! What’s a lesson you’ve learned, or that you’ve been reminded of recently, when it comes to dog training?

Amanda Nelson:Honestly, it just happened today. I’m at a competition right now — see, this is perfect timing. That’s a good question. I’m actually at a trial this weekend. Nargles isn’t competing this weekend, so I’m putting all my focus into Ally, and I found myself today … because I’ve never put a lot of pressure on Ally because I’ve let her blossom and become her own little doggie, but I’ve always had Nargles to run.

I realized today, I was running Ally and I found myself just putting all this pressure on her of … now Nargles can’t run for a couple of weekends because she’s got a little injury, so I’m letting her have some time off, and all of a sudden I just found myself putting all this pressure on to “Well, you need to do this, and you need to do this, and we should be doing this.” I learned today, and I’ve been doing it for the past couple of weekends, patience and let your dog be your dog. Let them just be.

I found she completely changed. She was really coming up, and I was running her and Nargles together, like, “Wow, look at Ally go, she’s giving me so much good stuff.” Then all of a sudden these past couple of weekends, to me, until somebody pointed it out, I keep telling myself, “She’s going backwards, she’s not doing well, she’s not doing her contacts very well, she’s not doing this very well, and the big thing she’s not wanting to change directions really well, she’s regressing, I need to do this, I need to retrain this.”

And then I took a step back, and a friend of mine was like, “You know, you’re treating her like she’s already this elite-level competition dog, and she’s not. Because all your focus is on her.” Definite lesson I learned, but I think everybody — I think every dog trainer, every handler, no matter what sport — you find yourself falling into that trap of “My dog needs to be this. My dog is this old, and all these other dogs have all these titles, and my dog should have that title,” or “The littermates from that litter are all going to World Team, but my dog is not.” That sort of thing. I found myself doing that. I found myself going, “She’s 5, she should do this and she should be this and we should be here.”

I’ve never felt that way with her before because I’ve always had my other dog to focus on, and I found myself falling into that trap.

So it’s a lesson I don’t quite know how to put into words. I guess the one word would be behind it, but I guess it’s more of let your dog be who they are, I guess is what I’m trying to say in a roundabout jumble of words.

Melissa Breau:I honestly think it’s a great lesson, because I think anybody who’s ever competed in anything, not just agility, knows that feeling. You start to get nervous before a competition, especially if you only have one dog that you’re running. You get a little hyper-focused, you get a little hyper-attentive, you start to stress about little things that maybe wouldn’t bother you if you had another dog to think about running before them, or something else to think about or focus on. I totally get that. That seems like it’s something that will resonate big-time. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Amanda! This is great.

Amanda Nelson:Thank you so much. I love this. This is just fantastic.

Melissa Breau:It was fun to chat. And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners for tuning in!

We’ll be back next week, this time we’ll actually be back with Denise Fenzi! We’ll be doing a short recap of Camp from this year, and I’ll share a recording of her opening talk, so you won’t want to miss it!

If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Heather Lawson is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer, a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner (KPA-CTP), a CGN Evaluator and a Freestyle judge. She has been training dogs and their humans for more than 20 years, after deciding that the corporate world just wasn't cutting it anymore.

She is the owner of dogWISE Training & Behaviour Center Inc., where she teaches group classes for companion pets, competitive obedience, and rally, in addition to providing behaviour consults and private lessons.

Next Episode:

To be released 6/8/2018, featuring Amanda Nelson, talking about introducing distance to your agility training!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau:This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Heather Lawson.

Heather is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer, a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner (KPA-CTP), a CGN Evaluator and a Freestyle judge. She has been training dogs and their humans for more than 20 years, after deciding that the corporate world just wasn't cutting it anymore.

She is the owner of dogWISE Training & Behaviour Center Inc., where she teaches group classes for companion pets, competitive obedience, and rally, in addition to providing behaviour consults and private lessons.

Hi Heather, welcome back to the podcast!

Heather Lawson:Hi Melissa. Thanks for having me again.

Melissa Breau:I’m excited to chat. To start us out and to refresh listeners’ memories a little bit, can you just tell us a little bit about your dogs and what you’re working on with them?

Heather Lawson:I currently am down to just two dogs, two German Shepherds, Piper, who will be turning 3 at the end of May, and my old boy, Tag, who just turned 12 a couple of days ago.

Tag obviously is now retired and having the good life with my husband when I take off with Piper.

Piper, I’m working on confirmation with her and trying to get my last two points I need for my championship. At the same time, I’m also working and training her for obedience and rally and all the other fun stuff that I’m going to do with her.

Melissa Breau:We chatted a little bit before this about what we were going to talk about today, and I asked you to chat about some of the fundamental skills that are covered in TEAM that can be reused over and over again throughout a dog’s career to teach a variety of other skills — those things that serve as a building block. It’s in the back of my mind ever since you did your webinar on all the different ways you use a chin rest to teach other skills, which I was a little blown away by the so many different things you do with chin rests. To start us out, for anyone who didn’t join the webinar, would you mind just sharing some of those things that you use that chin rest skill to build out?

Heather Lawson:The chin rest I ended up starting mainly because I needed a way to just get my dogs’ focus. So I started using the chin rest for that, just to say, “Here I am, check in, look at me.” And then I started to turn it into a whole bunch of other things and realized I can use it for my cooperative care, which is your veterinary care and anything else that I have to do with the dogs.

When, for instance, I’m administering medication to ears or eyes or anything like that, I can just ask for a nice easy chin rest and I can apply the medications. There’s no fuss, no muss. My dogs are used to putting their head in the chin.

I can also, as I said, use it for confirmation, so when I’ve got Piper in a show and I need to settle her down, or to stack her for presentation to the judge, I can just hold my hand out and she puts her chin there, and I can move her back and forth or keep her in position while I appropriately stack her legs and get her ready for examination. It also allows me to put out my hand for her to put her chin on for the judge to take a look at her mouth. She keeps her head there nice and quiet and I can lift up the lips, I’ve even taught her to open her mouth on cue, and he can take a look nice and easy, and he doesn’t have to put his hands into her mouth.

The other thing that I like the chin rest for is teaching the concept of holding still. Once I’ve taught the chin rest, or even a nose target, a duration nose target, I find that once the dog understands that concept of holding their nose or their chin rest somewhere, they actually can translate holding still to many other behaviors that I need them to do.

I can also use it for the dumbbell hold by using the chin rest for the dog to place their chin as they grip the bar of the dumbbell, and it’s an easy, just a slight, holding up. It teaches them quiet and allows me to gradually decrease my hand from that position.

I can actually turn that chin rest into a nice close front as well. Teaching Piper, this is the first one I’ve used the chin rests for the fronts, with Piper is I wanted her nice and close, right up touching me, so I got her to target my hand, and then I transferred it onto my body, and now when she comes in for her fronts she is 90 percent straight most of the time. We’re still working on it, but she’s 90 percent straight most of the time and she’s close. At this point she is touching me, but that’s fine. I will take the points if she continues to touch me in a trial situation, but generally that will back off a little bit when you get different kinds of ring stress and things like that involved that dogs usually don’t come in quite as close sometimes, but I’m still going to keep her working at that. So that’s basically what I do with my chin rest. I’ve got all different kinds of things that I can use it for.

Melissa Breau:Especially anybody who’s ever trained a German Shepherd knows that getting the dog in nice and close can be a little harder than with some other breeds, with space sensitivity and whatnot, so that’s awesome.

Heather Lawson:Exactly. And that’s why teaching her, it also, like, the chin rest was a really great exercise to teach her overall handling. She’s not afraid of anybody coming in and doing all those different kinds of things that they need to do to her, because I’ve got that chin rest and she trusts that chin rest, and she trusts that I’m not going to let anything negative happen to her, and it allows me to do that much more with her.

Melissa Breau:Would you mind just taking one of those examples and maybe walking us through it in a little more detail and breaking it down a little bit, how the chin rest helps you get that end behavior?

Heather Lawson:Since I’m doing TEAM 2 at the moment, and it seems to be a bugaboo for everybody, what I like to use the chin rest for is, as I mentioned earlier, just the dumbbell hold. I teach the dumbbell take with teeth on it and with just a little bit of a tiny grip separately, obviously. Then, if I’ve got a little bit of a problem with, for instance, trying to shape the dog to hold it even more, I can turn around and take that chin rest, and I get the chin rest separately on its own, and I can turn around and take that chin rest and add it to the dumbbell hold.

What I do is I will hold my flat hand as if I’m asking for a chin rest, hold the dumbbell just up above it, and as the dog comes in to take the bar on the dumbbell, I can just hold my hand up a little bit more, get that little bit of a hold, hold, get stillness, it allows me to mark stillness.

That seems to be the hardest part for everybody to get is that initial stillness, and by using the chin rest behavior and adding it to the dumbbell take, it allows you to progress onto a really good hold from that point.

Melissa Breau:I know another tool that you’ve mentioned you use in a number of different ways is a platform. I was hoping we could get into that and talk about platforms a little bit. What kind of things can you use a platform to teach?

Heather Lawson:Oh gosh, there is so much that you can, and also, again, it depends on the type of platform. For instance, many people have difficulty in trying to create distance and to have their dogs actually anchored at that distance.

Say, for instance, you’re sending out on your utility go-out. Lots of times your dogs will go out, and then they’ll turn around when you say “sit,” and they walk in three or four paces. That’s not so good. A platform can help to keep them out to that anchored spot.

You can use a platform for fronts. Again, depending on the type of platform you’re using, you can use it to teach heel position, you can teach change of position and precision using the platforms. If I’m wanting to teach my dog different positions in heel position, such as a sit-stand-down all in parallel, having a narrow platform for them to perform those behaviors on helps them remain in that parallel position, and then, of course, gradually you fade it out.

If I want to teach my dogs to go out to a specific spot anywhere, I can place a variety of platforms and I can do directional sends, and because they’re heavily magnetized to them, and by magnetized I mean they have a huge reinforcement history on the platforms, they are just raring to go because that’s what they want to do is they want to get there and they want to get their food.

I use platforms a lot when I’m teaching outside of obedience things. I use it for a stationing behavior, so teaching stays, and things like when I’m doing some of my concept classes, where the dog has to return to a station and wait for their next direction. So it helps the dog when they’re not getting any direction from you, they return back to station or to platform.

Melissa Breau:If somebody out there listening is used to teaching something like a front or a heel position without a platform, what are some of the advantages of using one, or maybe even if they’ve already taught those positions, going back and teaching that platform skill later on, if they, say, taught a front without it?

Heather Lawson:Say for instance you’ve got the issue of the dog maybe not coming in all the way. You can turn around and use a smaller platform to get a smaller, tighter sit in front, you can use a foot-to-target type of little tiny platform to bring the dog in closer. If you’ve got a dog that tends to be quite footsy, for instance in heel position when you’re doing your stands, you can use the platform to teach them how to remain still and not move forward. If you don’t normally teach with a platform, sometimes giving the dog something different allows them to grasp the concept.

You know how sometimes a student will hear something from you numerous times, and you’re going over and over and over, “I’ve told you that before, I’ve told you that before,” and then somebody will come along and say, “Oh, why don’t you do this?” and it’s the exact same thing that you told them, but just slightly different, and they go, “Oh, did you know so-and-so told me to do this?” and you’re going, “Uh, yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell you.” Well, sometimes I think by changing your equipment, or changing how you present a particular concept to your dog, sometimes that’s what helps the dogs take that leap and get more precise, or understand the position, or understand the concept that they’re not to move. I think by going back and maybe even taking a look at the platforms and seeing how you can help convey that concept, you’re going to get more precision later on.

Melissa Breau:Are platforms and foot targets basically the same thing? Can you use them in the same ways? I’d love to hear a little bit about what you can or can’t do with one that you can do with the other.

Heather Lawson:With the platforms they’re generally longer, so the length of the dog, so that if, for instance, you put the dog down in a sphinx down, the dog would not be hanging off the edges. The platforms are generally quite narrow, so that, again, when the dog either sits or lies down, they are in a very, very specific position. Foot targets are dealing with just the front feet or just the rear feet. They’re not the same thing, but they can do the same job, if that makes sense. When I want to fade out a large platform, I will go down to a foot target. With foot targets I generally can use, if the foot target is low, I can generally use them for fading out the platform, and if I’m teaching, for instance, position changes, you go down to a small foot target or even a flat foot target, and now you can ask your dog to change positions.

My foot targets that I usually recommend for people to use are generally the size of a 2x4, and generally no wider than what your dog can actually put their two front feet on comfortably and stand at a normal position. Especially if you’re teaching nice, close fronts, the dog comes and puts their feet on that front target, they can then sit properly. If you use a round foot target, like a perch that we use for pivoting, you’ll find that the dogs kind of have a rear-end splay and they therefore won’t sit as straight as they should be.

So when I’m working distance and I want to get rid of the big platforms, I’ll go down to a foot target. It’s basically just a mini-platform, but we call them foot targets because it makes more sense to people.

Melissa Breau:Right. What are some of the different types of platforms or targets that you use and some of the different ways that you use them?

Heather Lawson:The long narrow platforms basically are for position, as I said, either straight in heel position or straight out in front of you. Same thing with the foot targets. They are used for the front and the rear feet. And then your perch, and I like to use a round perch when I’m first teaching the dog how to use their rear end for pivoting.

Later on, if I’m working with the handler for footwork, I’ll use a small square so that you can do quarter-turns to teach the dog also to turn with your body language, and it gets the handler ready for their footwork and how they’re going to use their body to turn their dog.

If I want to do a really nice tight sit in front and still use a platform because, for instance, the dog is coming off crooked, then I’ll use a shorter platform, more so so that the only thing the dog can do is basically sit on this little platform, so you get a nice tuck sit and you can then get straight.

Also, too, you can teach the dogs with the platforms for the various things, you can teach them whether or not you want to have a default stand on a platform, or whether or not you want a default sit on the platform. For long platforms I usually look for a default of a stand. If I’m using a small rectangular platform, I’m looking for a default of a sit. Foot targets, I look for a default of a stand on that foot target, and the same thing, a default of a stand, on the perch as well.

Melissa Breau:I think a lot of people may recognize how valuable a platform behavior can be, but they don’t want to haul all those different platforms everywhere they train. Can you use the same platform for more than one skill? How does that work?

Heather Lawson:You certainly can, and as I said, with the long platform, you can certainly use it for a whole variety of skills and behaviors and positions. You just have to be very careful that you’re encouraging the dog based on the behavior that you’re training.

So if you’re looking for a front, you want to make sure that your dog has learned to plant their front feet as close to you as possible and then bring their rear in so you’re getting a nice little tuck sit, versus standing and then you saying “sit” and they rock back, and now you’ve got a foot-and-a-half distance between you and the dog. You want to get that up as close as you certainly can.

Some people actually make platforms where they can split them off, so that you’ve got a shorter platform for the sit and a longer platform that you can attach to it with Velcro that makes for the long platform that you need. And then you can take the Velcro and split it apart and now you’ve got a short sit platform.

I know I’ve done that a couple of times. I made one like that. They’re easy to make, easy to haul around. The platforms really aren’t all that heavy. You can really make some very, very lightweight ones; you’ve just got to use your imagination. They’re mostly made out of interlocking foam mats. My foot target for my dogs is actually a cork yoga brick that is generally, I think they’re about 4 inches high normally, and I just went and cut it down on the saw, and cut it in half, so now I have about a 2-inch-high small cork platform that is heavy enough that the dog’s not going to tip it, but it’s not so heavy that I can’t cart it around somewhere. It weighs less than a pound of butter. It’s easy to chuck in my car and it’s no big deal.

An upturned food bowl — if you’ve got your dogs in your car, a stainless steel food bowl works for a perch. You can definitely use your equipment for a variety of different things, but most people can be discouraged by the fact that they do think that they have to carry a lot of stuff around. But most of the stuff, if you look at what your regular gear is, you can interchange a whole lot of things.

Melissa Breau:One of the other behaviors that I wanted to talk through that I think maybe people don’t immediately grasp the importance of is the TEAM tests behavior of a “fly,” or a behavior that teaches a dog to go out and around an object. To start out, before we get into the uses, for anybody who isn’t familiar with the behavior, can you describe a little bit of the criteria for it in the TEAM test?

Heather Lawson:For the fly, the handler sends the dog around an object. It can be anything from a cone to a pole to a garbage can to a chair, doesn’t really matter as long as it’s placed 5 feet away or more. The purpose is to teach the dog to go out and around and to work at a distance, so this is obviously useful for more advanced exercises.

You can also use the cone to teach the dog how to find front and/or heel position from a variety of angles, especially if you’re on the move with heeling. Basically, the handler stands 5 feet from the cone and cues the dog from heel position. The dog must start in heel position, which can be standing or sitting. They can send them with any combination of your hand, your arm, verbal, and/or even a forward foot motion is acceptable.

The exercise begins after the handler cues the dog and then ends when the dog has circled the object 180 degrees, so that means the dog must go out to the cone, circle it, and be on their way back. As soon as they’re on their way back to you, that ends the exercise.

So it’s not hard at all. It’s just making sure that you’re getting the dog to go out with one cue and that you’re not moving until after the dog has basically come around the crest of the cone and is on their way back. It’s a pretty easy exercise to do. It can be used for a whole bunch of things, and if you want to go into that, we can cover that too.

Melissa Breau:Absolutely. That’s my next question for you: What is it meant to teach and how can we use it?

Heather Lawson:It’s meant to teach, as I said, distance work. It also can be used to teach your dog how to stride out after a broad jump. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the dogs that kind of cut the corner of the broad jump and you think,Oh my god, they’re going to slip, they’re going to fall. I’ve seen that happen, where the dog has, and the only reason that they cut the corners is that basically they want to get back to you as soon as possible and get to that front position.

So in order to get them to take at least two strides out, you can use a cone placed out in front of your broad jump as a way to pattern that two stride out by asking the dog to jump and then fly — most people use the word fly, or away, or around — you can teach the dog to go out, take those two strides, and then turn and come back to you. That eliminates that broad jump injury.

You can also put the cones out in the beginning stages of teaching your directed jumping, so you can teach the dog how to go straight center and have a cone on either side, and it gets them used to coming around at an angle without interfering with your actual jumps or putting your jump stanchions out as you’re working through those initial stages.

You can also teach your dog to go out and around, and especially over a high jump, if you want the dog to go out, round the cone, and come directly back over the high jump without going around the high jump after they’ve picked up their dumbbell, which so often happens.

You can also use it as a way to bring down a dog and give them a brain break when you’re heeling. If you have a couple of cones placed out, and you’re going to be doing some heeling, and it’s going to be a little bit of a … maybe you’re working on something that’s a little bit more difficult for the dog, all of a sudden you can send them off to a fly, they can go out, run around the fly, and then they come back up and catch you in heel position. So you can make more of a game out of your heeling.

You can send them over the jump, over the fly, come back to you, and if you take the cone and you use it, instead of just going out and around the cone and coming straight back to you, you can actually teach the dogs to do tight 270’s in either left or right direction, and that you can do by either shaping it, clicking it, or what I normally do to start the dogs off is I will send them and then I will … whichever direction I’m going to send them, so if I’m sending them from my left and they’re coming around and they’re going to end up on my right, I will take off to my left, and all of a sudden now I’ve got a really nice, tight 270 to the left and the opposite way, 270 to the right.

And you can get them going around the cones more than once, you can add multiple cones, which actually is a way to introduce figure 8s, you can stand in the middle and send your dog on their own figure 8s and their own cones, doing a clover leaf or any other types of things, and it gets them used to working around an inanimate object.

For me, what I do is I have these little scarecrow people that I then stand in my cones, and I will send the dog out and around the cone so they get used to funny things that they have to work around. And I think it would be helpful … if I’m not mistaken, you do what’s the …

Melissa Breau: Treibball.

Heather Lawson:Treibball, yes. You could probably use it to teach your dogs how to go out and away to your left or your right, and straight out, if you needed to. So I’m sure that if people are doing sports like that, or even if you’re doing agility, teaching your dogs to go for directional cues, cones are excellent because they’re not interfering with your actual jumps, and it’s just teaching them directional cues.

Melissa Breau:That’s certainly a lot of different ways.

Heather Lawson:I know. I could probably come up with more, too, but it’s just some of the things that are on the top of my head. My biggest one for me, for my own personal use, is I like to teach the dog to stride out a couple of steps after that broad jump, because I’ve seen dogs be badly hurt because they’ve slipped on floors, and if you’re working a dog and you’re campaigning a dog and they’re jumping and they’re doing the broad jump over and over and over again, that’s a lot of concussion and twisting on that one right front leg when they land. So if they can start to land, start to go out straight, take a stride or two and go around, and then come back to you, that’s much better for their health and long-term working ability.

Melissa Breau: One last question for you, Heather. Are there other behaviors that are super-versatile like the chin rest and platforming and even the send around an object behavior?

Heather Lawson:As it pertains to TEAM there’s all kinds of little behaviors that people don’t really realize how much they’re going to affect as you go through TEAM.

If you’re familiar with TEAM, which I know you are, there’s ten behaviors in the very beginning, and then, as you get further on, you’re actually using all of those little behaviors that you learned in the beginning.

So in the beginning of TEAM we’re very precision-oriented, and then as you get further on in TEAM we’re less precision, and we take that because we know that you’ve learned how to teach your dog the platform, you’ve learned how to use the equipment, you’ve learned how to fade the equipment, you’ve learned how to use the core, the foundation behaviors in the very beginning such as targeting and sending out and away, bringing your dog into heel position, finding front, all these things.

No matter which way you go in obedience, you’re going to use all those different pieces, so there’s not one super behavior; it’s just that they’re all super-versatile. I think what throws a lot of people off is,Hey, I’ve got to learn all these behaviors or I’m never going to get this, and really, once you’ve got the core foundations, you can pretty much do anything you want. You should be able to step into almost any kind of dog sport, take a look at what they have and what they’re doing, and then take what you’ve learned with your send-outs, your targeting, your sends, your holds, your come into heel, come into front, and apply them to those specific behaviors that are required for that dog sport.

So for me, versatile like the chin rest platforms and even send around an object, I use those all the time to teach the precision that I need so that I can now apply that and teach that concept. I’ll say to my dog, “OK, you know that target thing that I kept sending you out to? Well, now I need you to go out there and I need you to stay out there while I go this distance away from you.” And the dogs are quite comfortable to do that because they have, as I said, that reinforcement history on those pieces of equipment, and when I take them away it’s not a big deal because I’ve gradually decreased their requirement for those pieces of equipment and shown them that, “Yes, you can still do this even though I’m maybe fading the equipment out for you,” so that when we finally do get to the final exercise, they understand it completely. There’s no holes.

And if I have a problem, I’ve got something to go back to. I can take out that little piece, I can pull out that platform, I can show my dog again what I need from them, and show them that, ‘Yes, you can do that. Remember that thing that I taught you way back when? I need you to apply it here and I need you to do it this way.” And it’s like a little refresher. If I glossed over all of that and didn’t use those bits and pieces and put that foundation into place, I’d have nothing to be able to work with and I’d have to go back to square one each and every time I had a problem. This way, all I need to do is pull out a little bit and then reinsert it again.

Melissa Breau:Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Heather!

Heather Lawson:You’re very welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Melissa Breau:And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in!

We’ll be back next week with Amanda Nelson to discuss introducing distance into our agility training.

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CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.